As usual I have jumped in the water over my head. I have read through "Advanced Bash Scripting' on the Linux Document Project and the book 'Shell Scripting Recipes' by Chris F. A. Johnson and do not find the script code snippet I need. It is also possible I don't know what I am looking for either.

I have a very large file with lines of this flavor:
I would like to wind up with a file that takes this format.
I did read in the book that a good application to search and extract information from a line was either 'sed' or 'awk'.

Is there a tutoral that can quickly teach me or show me how to do this. I don't use either of these in my everyday life. At my age I'm doing good to hold on to what bash I know.

Thanks
Dave

Pardon my regex, but maybe: cat very large file with lines of this flavor | sed -e "s/<[/?a-z ].*\">//g" -e "s/<\/.*>/;/g" -e "s/<\!\-\{2\}.//g" -e "s/.-\{2\}>//g" | sed '$!N;s/\n/ /'

I shall not pardon you! It is most welcome. 'regex' is something I can not bend my mind around. I don't understand.
To me a regular expression should be 'search for this' not /\?.,??

I will give your suggestion a try in a few minutes and let you know how it works.

Thanks for the reply.
Dave